Lisey's Story(76)

"Scott, are you...did a doctor..."

He's shaking his head. "It's not physical. Listen, babyluv. It's here." He taps his forehead, between the eyes. "Lunacy and the Landons go together like peaches and cream, and I'm not talking about an Edgar Allan Poe story or any genteel Victorian wekeep-auntie-in-the-attic ladies' novel; I'm talking about the real-world dangerous kind that runs in the blood."

"Scott, you're not crazy - " But she's thinking about his walking out of the dark and holding the bleeding ruins of his hand out to her, his voice full of jubilation and relief. Crazy relief. She's remembering her own thought as she wrapped that ruin in her blouse: that he might be in love with her, but he was also half in love with death.

"I am, " he says softly. "I am crazy. I have delusions and visions. I write them down, that's all. I write them down and people pay me to read them."

For a moment she's too stunned by this (or maybe it's the memory of his mangled hand, which she has deliberately put away from her, that has stunned her) to reply. He is speaking of his craft - that is always how he refers to it in his lectures, never as his art but as his craft - as delusion. And that is madness.

"Scott," she says at last, "writing's your job. "

"You think you understand that," he says, "but you don't understand the gone part. I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey. And I'm not going to sit here under this tree and give you the history of the Landons, because I only know a little. I went back three generations, got scared of all the blood I was finding on the walls, and quit. I saw enough blood - some of it my own - when I was a kid. Took my Daddy's word for the rest. When I was a kid, Daddy said that the Landons - and the Landreaus before them - split into two types: gomers and bad-gunky. Bad-gunky was better, because you could let it out by cutting. You had to cut, if you didn't want to spend your life in the bughouse or the jailhouse. He said it was the only way."

"Are you talking about self-mutilation, Scott?"

He shrugs, as if unsure. She is unsure, as well. She has seen him naked, after all. He has a few scars, but only a few.

"Blood-bools?" she asks.

This time he's more positive. "Blood-bools, yeah."

"That night when you stuck your hand through the greenhouse glass, were you letting out the bad-gunky?"

"I suppose. Sure. In a way." He stubs his cigarette in the grass. He takes a long time, and doesn't look at her while he does it. "It's complicated. You have to remember how terrible I felt that night, a lot of things had been piling up - "

"I should never have - "

"No," he says, "let me finish. I can only say this once."

She stills.

"I was drunk, I was feeling terrible, and I hadn't let it out -  it - in a long time. I hadn't had to. Mostly because of you, Lisey."

Lisey has a sister who went through an alarming bout of self-mutilation in her early twenties. Amanda's past all that now - thank God - but she bears the scars, mostly high on her inner arms and thighs. "Scott, if you've been cutting yourself, shouldn't you have scars - "

It's as if he hasn't heard her. "Then last spring, long after I thought he'd shut up for good, I be good-goddam if he didn't start up talking to me again. 'It runs in you, Scoot,'

I'd hear him say. 'It runs in your blood just like a sweetmother. Don't it?'"

"Who, Scott? Who started talking to you?" Knowing it's either Paul or his father, and probably not Paul.

"Daddy. He says, 'Scooter, if you want to be righteous, you better let that bad-gunky out. Get after it, now, don't smuckin wait.' So I did. Little...little..." He makes small cutting gestures - one on his cheek, one on his arm - to illustrate. "Then that night, when you were mad..." He shrugs. "I got after the rest. Over and done with. Over and out. And we 'us fine. We 'us fine. Tell you one thing, I'd bleed myself dry like a hog on a chain before I'd hurt you. Before I'd ever hurt you." His face draws down in an expression of contempt she has never seen before. "I ain't never yet been like him. My Daddy." And then, almost spitting it: "Fuckin Mister Sparky. "

She doesn't speak. She doesn't dare. Isn't sure she could, anyway. For the first time in months she wonders how he could cut his hand so badly and have so little scarring. Surely it isn't possible. She thinks: His hand wasn't just cut; his hand was mangled. Scott, meanwhile, has lit another Herbert Tareyton with hands that are shaking just the smallest bit. "I'll tell you a story," he says. "Just one story, and let it stand for all the stories of a certain man's childhood. Because stories are what I do." He looks at the rising cigarette smoke. "I net them from the pool. I've told you about the pool, right?"

"Yes, Scott. Where we all go down to drink."

"Yep. And cast our nets. Sometimes the really brave fisherfolk - the Austens, the Dostoevskys, the Faulkners - even launch boats and go out to where the big ones swim, but that pool is tricky. It's bigger than it looks, it's deeper than any man can tell, and it changes its aspect, especially after dark."

She says nothing to this. His hand slips around her neck. At some point it steals inside her unzipped parka to cup her breast. Not out of lust, she's quite sure; for comfort.